Robinson was now very comfortable, and as he had saved from the wreck two cats and a dog, he did not feel quite so lonely. He had got, also, ink and pens and paper, so that he could keep a diary; and he set up a large wooden cross, on which he cut with his knife the date of his landing on the island—30th September 1659; and every day he cut a notch on the post, with a longer one each Sunday, so that he might always know how the months and years passed.
As for food, he found that there were many goats on the island, and numbers of pigeons, and he had no difficulty in shooting as many as he needed.
But now he saw that his tent and cave were too small for all the things he had stowed in them, so he began to make the cave bigger, bringing out all the rock and soil that he cut down, and making with it a kind of terrace round the inside of his stockade. And as he was sure that there were no wild beasts on the island to harm him, he went on tunnelling to the right hand till he broke through the rock outside his fence.
Then he began to hang things up against the side of the cave, and he even made shelves, and a door for the outside entrance. This was a very difficult job, and took him a long time; for, to make a board, he was forced to cut down a whole tree, and chop away with his axe till one side was flat, and then cut at the other side till the board was thin enough, when he smoothed it with his adze. But in this way, out of each tree he would only get one plank. He made for himself also a table and a chair, and finally got his castle, as he called it, in very good order.
With all his care, however, there was one thing that he forgot, and that was, when he had made the cave so much bigger, to prop it, so as to keep the roof from falling in. And so one day he got a terrible fright, and was nearly killed, by a huge bit of the soft rock which fell and buried many of his things. It took weeks of hard work afterwards to clear away the fallen rubbish, and to cut beams strong enough to prop the roof.
Every day, all this time, he used to climb up the hill and look around over the lonely waters, hoping, always hoping, that some morning he might see the sails of a ship that would take him home. But none ever came, and sometimes the tears ran down his cheeks because of the sorrow he felt at being so utterly alone. At times even, he thought in his misery that if only he had any kind of a boat, it would be better to sail away, and chance reaching other land, rather than to stop where he was. By and by, however, he grew less unhappy, for he had plenty of work to do.
CHAPTER III
THE EARTHQUAKE AND HURRICANE;
AND HOW ROBINSON BUILT A BOAT
Now about this time, when Robinson had been some months on the island, heavy and constant rain began to fall, and sometimes weeks would pass without a single dry day. He found that instead of there being Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, as in England, the seasons in his island were divided into the wet and the dry. There was no cold weather, no winter. It chanced that just before this first rain began, Robinson had emptied out some refuse from bags which had once held rice, and other grain, and he had forgotten all about having emptied them. So he was very much astonished to find, some time afterwards, both barley and rice growing near his tent, [Pg 23]in the shade of the rock. The ears, when ripe, he kept to sow again, and from this very small beginning, in the course of a few seasons, he had a great quantity of grain, both for food and for sowing. But this meant every year much hard work, for he had no plough nor harrow, and all the ground had to be dug with a clumsy spade, made from a very hard, heavy wood that grew on the island.
At first Robinson could not grind the grain that he grew, nor make bread from it. If he could have found a large stone, slightly hollow on top, he might, by pounding the grain on it with another round stone, have made very good meal. But all the stones he could find were too soft, and in the end he had to make a sort of mill of hard wood, in which he burnt a hollow place, and on that he pounded the grain into meal with a heavy stick.
Baking he did by building a big fire, then raking away the ashes, and putting the dough on the hot place, covered with a kind of basin made of clay, over which he heaped the red ashes. In this way very good bread can be made.